In 1996, reproduction armourer Jeffrey Hedgecock and historical clothier
Gwen Nowrick joined forces to create Historic Enterprises, Inc. Enthusiastic
reenactors, meticulous researchers and obsessive artisans, their company
reflects their passion for history and attention to detail.

Personally developing every item in their range, they delight in providing
well-documented, exacting historical replicas to historical sites, museums,
reenactors and educators around the world.

Motley

The use of 'mottled' or 'heather' fabrics in Black Swan Designs clothing

Although ‘’motley’ is often used to describe a heterogeneous, often incongruous mixture of elements, in Middle English the word motlei refered to variegated cloth, i.e cloth made of multiple colours. I like and use these ‘motley’ fabrics because I think they represent a class of fabric which shows up frequently in the archaeological record but is underutilized in reenactment.

To understand this fabric it is important to understand a few basics of textile production, including fibres, weaving and dying.

Fabric is made of fibres treated a number of different ways. Fibre can be left natural, and used in the colour it comes off the animal, or in a bleached or semi-bleached state.

It can be dyed in the wool before or after spinning, or it can be piece dyed as a length after it comes off the loom.

The fibres can be sorted by colour, or they can be mixed to produce a variously coloured thread, generally refered to as 'mixed spun' or 'mixed spinning'.

The spun fibre is first woven into cloth. The weaver can use the same colour thread for the warp and the weft, or they can use 2 or more different colours. 70% of the clothing from Herjolfsnes show warp and weft of different colours, regardless of weaving pattern (1). Most of those colours appear to have been dyed over naturally-coloured fibre. Similar proportions of multi-coloured fabric turn up in archaeological remains starting with the earliest finds- the fibre making up the Tolund man's clothing is multi coloured, and the skirt and scarf worn by the Huldremose woman is an rather complex plaid made of multiple colours (2). Multi-coloured textile remains comprise a significant proportion of the remains from Coppergate (3).

J. Peter Wild discusses wool colouration in his book 'Textiles in Archaeology' (4), including a section on Scottish sheep. He says the first domestic sheep were dark brown with paler underbelly wool. White is a dominant gene, so early on men began to breed selectively so white or grey animals became commoner. Analysis of prehistoric textiles reveal that by the Iron Age fleeces of various colours and tones would have been found in the same flock- dark brown, red brown, light brown, grey and white. He goes on to discuss two breeds of Scottish sheep; the first is the Souy, which has flourished on the islands of St. Kilda since at least the Viking era. These sheep are dark brown and light brown with white underbelly and rump patch. Soay wool would yield a naturally mottled/varigated thread when spun.

Orkney sheep live on the seashore of North Ronaldsay, and have predominantly grey fleeces comprised of white and dark hairs, but there are also white, near-white,reddish-brown and dark brown animals (5).

Laura Hodges discusses 'motley' fabric in some depth in her book 'Chaucer and Costume' (6). "Mottelee has been variously defined...as 'polychrome' or multi-coloured....motlee was inexpensive to moderate in price....the best quality of motley might be fashionable..but it would not speak loudly of great wealth...it speaks discretely of economic moderation." (7)

Based on what we know of the colouration of period sheep, archaeological finds and written records, I believe a number of modern 'heather' and 'mottled' fabrics could easily fit the category of 'motley', and match archaeological remains.

Here are a few examples...

Plain woven cloth of mixed spun, natural colour. Even 'solid coloured' sheep are never 100% solid, individual hairs being multi-coloured within a narrow or broad range. This type of fabric could have been made from the undyed wool of a brown sheep, or thread mixed-spun from the fleece of a number of sheep.

Broken chevron twill which could have been woven with thread spun from the fleece of a white or cream sheep (warp) and a brown sheep (weft).

Finer weave, woven of smaller threads spun from a mixed fleece.

Finer fabric, woven in a broken chevron twill which could have been woven with thread spun from the fleece of a white or cream sheep (warp) and a black sheep (weft).

Finer fabric, woven in a broken chevron twill which could have been woven with thread spun from the fleece of a white or cream sheep (warp) and weft threads overdyed with madder. This pinky-cantaloupe orange is a *classic* 2nd bath madder colour, and variations in colour would be produced by dying over fibre with a natural gradation of colour. Since this cloth requires dying of at least some of the fibre, it would be more expensive cloth than either of the others shown above.

A more complex weave of natural and dyed colours. Brown could potentially be overdyed dark fibre, white.ivory left as it came from the sheep, and the pinky-orange threads dyed with madder.

Stripes
Striped cloth is usually referred to as 'rayed' in period texts (8). The same texts refer to large blocks of colour (as in quartering, or colouring the left and right sides of garments in differing colours) as 'mi-parti', or 'parti-colour' (9). It is likely that both 'rayed' and 'mi-parti' colouration falls into the classification of 'motlei'. Based on what we know of the colouration of period sheep, archaeological finds and written records, I believe a number of modern 'heather' and 'mottled' fabrics could easily fit the category of 'motley' as well.

These are the reasons why I tend to use these 'motley' fabrics as much as I use 'piece dyed' solids. I see a lot of this type of cloth in the archaeological record, and I think it's underused in reenactment. I think many of us rely too heavily on visual sources to tell us what fabric looked like, and don't look at the actual extant textiles. We forget that an artist doesn't have the ability to paint weaves or subtle colour variations, and would simply paint them as a solid.